The European Union’s long-awaited White Paper for European Defence, which is intended to pave the way for unprecedented investment of €800bn ($865bn) by 2030, was published on March 19 by Andrius Kubilius, the Defense and Space Commissioner.
While it outlines several areas of defense capability, the paper does not address the crucial issue of member states’ political will, which has fallen drastically short. There are three ways the EU can rectify this as it seeks to prioritize resources to achieve combat readiness against Russia by 2030.
First, the EU needs to explicitly use the gaps in NATO’s capabilities to guide its industrial priorities. Despite the destabilizing effect of US President Donald Trump’s agenda, NATO remains the primary unifier for European defense collaboration, and the White Paper lacks a statement of priorities.
EU-level funding could boost nascent cooperation among member states on the production of artillery pieces and drones, for example, as well as the joint acquisition of tanker aircraft.
The progress on integrated air and missile defense, backed by the European Defence Fund, suggests the bloc is well placed to incentivize the gradual building of other strategic enablers, such as airborne early warning (AEW) aircraft and military satellites, for which the US remains largely indispensable (there are European AEW planes, built by Saab, and about 40 military satellites from a range of countries but American forces remain far more capable, with around 300.)
Similarly, the White Paper correctly identifies military mobility as crucial to ensuring forces and heavy equipment can be rushed to potential war zones on NATO’s (and the EU’s) eastern flank. To deliver this, the bloc needs to prioritize completion of the most urgent transport networks, such as the slowly expanding Rail Baltica, which links the Baltic States.
Second, unlocking political will is in part a question of ensuring there are shared benefits from defense market integration. One of the difficulties when discussing common funding for EU defense (especially through debt creation) is that the biggest and most industrialized member states stand to gain most.
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While it is positive the EU is seeking to leverage its Investment Fund for defense innovation, the bloc should also consider prioritizing the use of its Cohesion Fund for defense manufacturing. This would assist regional development in its smaller and less industrialized members.
Brussels should at the same time assess the extent to which common investment in basic research and development might create a more equal distribution of benefits across the EU. This would particularly benefit small- and medium-sized defense companies, which are typically reluctant to invest in research because profits are scattered and uncertain.
Third, the EU should emphasize to European taxpayers the benefits of supporting Ukraine that go beyond merely halting Russian aggression. The Ukrainian battlefield offers real-time feedback on military innovation, for example, such as the adaptation of civilian drones into AI-powered vehicles for reconnaissance and air attacks. One day, that’s very likely to save European lives.
The newly established EU Innovation Office in Kyiv is important for matchmaking between defense developers and companies, and the bloc’s defense technology and industrial base stand to gain a lot from closer partnerships to develop high-tech weapons and mass-produce them.
As the EU incentivizes defense market integration, it must also regulate product standardization to ensure future weapons systems can work together. It has an important regulatory role to play in ensuring its industry manufactures defense products that are NATO interoperable.
As the supply of artillery shells and field radios to Ukraine has exposed, defense product standardization is incomplete across Europe because NATO has no means of enforcing it. The EU, however, is well placed to achieve this between new weapons systems, including by compelling the sharing of algorithms and data sets in the case of high-tech.
While the sense of urgency about European security is weakening resistance to joint borrowing for defense, there are still cumbersome national debates about budgetary allocations ahead, not least because leaders in Germany, France, Italy, and others are up against powerful opposition parties resistant to what they see as further centralization of power in Brussels.
The White Paper gets the external military imperatives right, but the EU has yet to reconcile them with its internal political and market logic. If that can be fixed, and member states are fully on board, the opportunity to reduce European reliance on the US is greater than ever before.
Henrik Larsen is a non-resident fellow with the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA.)
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the position or views of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis.
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CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America.
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